Looking for a new linux distro

Well, my disk with Ubuntu is starting to go, so I have set about ordering a new Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB hard drive.

Anyways, i'm not really liking Ubuntu Jaunty. It's still slow (like Ubuntu always was), firefox crawls and freezes often (on a dual-core with 4GB of RAM, this should not happen), the options to customize the interface are limited, and there are a few small things about GNOME that I otherwise have always disliked about it.

Anyways, i've been using linux since 2004 and my favorite OS had to have been Mandrake 10.1 and Kubuntu Fiesty (the version just prior to their changing over to KDE4). Anyways, i'm pretty good at doing stuff in the terminal and know some shell scripting and how to mess with most of the important config files in nano (not really interested in learning vi right now).

Can anyone recommend a good distro for me to try out? Someone recommended I try a BSD but I dont know if it supports all the linux apps i've grown to like. Any ideas?

Things I like:
Lots of interface customizability (like KDE3)
Package Management
speed
ease-of-maintainance
Good 3D acceleration and wine compatability
Elegant and low-key UI design (not plain, just not overdone)

Things I hate:
GNOME
Gentoo
Crudely put together repos

 

Thanks J, Fedora seems to meet a lot of the requirements I have, since responsiveness the most important one.

I'm also looking at arch-based distros, though I did build arch and tried kdemod last year, and didnt care for its KDEmod which was based on KDE 4.1. I used to have a portable linux distro called FaunOS (sadly, no longer maintained) which was arch-based, and even though it was running off of a 2.5 in portable drive, it was actually much more responsive than my native ubuntu install.

I'd rather invest effort into doing something more worthwhile than building a linux distro, but thanks for the bad advice.

 

Well, I installed Windows 7 not long after writing my last entry. I have to say that MS did a great job on that one, I found things on it which seemed to make computing a much smoother thing, I forgot about linux for a few weeks there as my two empty linux partitions just hung out not really doing anything.

So I decided to try a few things I wanted to try, archlinux and the new KDE4 desktop, I seemed to have found both of these in a distro called "Chakra Linux", which is basically the LinuxMint of Arch Linux (Arch requires you to start from the CLI, and install whatever services/DE/etc you want yourself via its easy-to-use package manager -- in this way you get a good handle on the way that it internally operates, but the things you learn from this can teach you things that can save you time in the long run).

Chakra is a fairly new distro that has a LiveCD, beautiful graphical installer, tons of excellent programs built in (K3B, Openoffice, Amarok, SMPlayer, Gwenview, Kopete Messenger, yakuake dropdown terminal, the AWESOME Kontact PIM/Email app), its own graphical package manager, and the maturing KDE4.3 desktop.

After some initial hitches with getting everything set up and orienting myself with having to manually do some of the thing which ubuntu automatically did for me, I have to say that I've found a very enjoyable to use desktop. It's fast, fleshed-out, and with compiz fusion very sleek and smooth flowing. With all of the initial stuff out of the way the only problems I'm having is that my max resolution is limited to 1024x768 as well that dolphin sometimes crashes. Yet these are minor problems to me.

This is definitely a worthy distro for KDE-heads and experienced linux users, as all of the apps included here are of the highest quality (except that I had to install firefox manually via the command 'pacman -Syu firefox') but I wouldnt recommend it to everybody, unless you are willing to learn to edit some config files and search google and forums. If it wasnt for the fact that I'm a gamer too, I would probably forget about Windows 7.